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John le Carré Has Not Mellowed With Age

John le Carré, the 20th century's pre-eminent spy writer.Credit
Nadav Kander for The New York Times

On a recent Saturday morning in February, two dozen or so scent hounds streamed through the streets of St. Buryan, a small village in Cornwall, England. Behind them drifted a loose formation of men and women perched atop well-groomed horses and wearing boots, breeches and hunting coats. As the fox hunt clopped through town, John le Carré, the pre-eminent spy writer of the 20th century, sipped from a paper cup of warm whiskey punch, doled out by a local pub to riders and spectators.

At 81, he remains an enviable specimen of humanity: tall, patrician, cleanlimbed, ruddy-complected. His white hair is floppy and well cut, so much so that the actor Ralph Fiennes, who starred in the 2005 film version of le Carré’s novel “The Constant Gardener,” badgered him for the name of his barber.

Le Carré is not a hunter himself, but he nodded at the people he knew and mounted a casual and running defense of fox hunting, as if he were doing color commentary from the 18th hole at the Masters. It’s an ancient part of the rural culture, he said. It’s egalitarian in this area (some 300 miles west-southwest of London), not an upper-class diversion. It’s also largely futile: an actual fox is rarely cornered. When one is, a trained eagle owl is brought in to kill it.

As the final horse strode past, le Carré swallowed the dregs of his punch and crumpled his cup. His eyebrows, so thatchy and animated that they seem ready to leap off his forehead and start nibbling the shrubbery, rose as he turned toward me, his blue eyes alight, and happily declared, “At least they aren’t hunting that poor goddamn thing with drones.”

It is hard to blame le Carré for being in a cheerful mood. As he enters his ninth decade, he is in the midst of a hardy late-career bloom, thanks in no small part to the critical and popular success of the 2011 film “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” based on his 1974 cold-war espionage classic of the same name. Subtle, somber and intellectually dexterous, the movie, which featured Gary Oldman as le Carré’s venerable MI6 master spy George Smiley, was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Oldman.

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The book that made his (pen) name in 1961.Credit
Gabrielle Plucknette/The New York Times

The film made his backlist fly from bookstore shelves. “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” alone sold more than a million copies in paperback and e-books last year — some 500,000 in the United Kingdom, 350,000 in North America and 150,000 in Germany and France. And it rekindled Hollywood’s interest. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rachel McAdams recently finished shooting “A Most Wanted Man,” based on le Carré’s 2008 thriller indicting the war on terror, which is scheduled for release next year. Ewan McGregor will star in a film adaptation of le Carré’s 2010 novel, “Our Kind of Traitor,” about a British couple on a tennis holiday who become entangled in a Russian defection. What’s more, Oldman may reprise his performance as Smiley when the movie version of “Smiley’s People,” the sequel to “Tinker Tailor,” is made.

Le Carré likes to visit these film sets — two of his four adult sons, Simon and Stephen, are the producers behind several of the adaptations — but only early on, and only to voice encouragement and to sprinkle what he calls “pixie dust.” After that, he leaves filmmakers alone, telling them they can call if necessary.

At the moment a new generation is stumbling upon his work, le Carré is still writing at something close to the top of his game. His 23rd novel, “A Delicate Truth,” about a supposed counterterrorist operation on the British overseas territory of Gibraltar gone dismally wrong, will be out next month. The book is an elegant yet embittered indictment of extraordinary rendition, American right-wing evangelical excess and the corporatization of warfare. It has a gently flickering love story and a jangling ending. And le Carré has not lost his ability to sketch, in a line or two, an entire character.

Readers like myself, mostly allergic to spy stories and genre narratives, have long been drawn to le Carré’s stuff because of the wit and incisiveness he manages to insert into pained understatement. His early books sketched, as he once put it about his Smiley novels, “a kind of ‘Comédie humaine’ of the cold war, told in terms of mutual espionage.”

In his lesser books, le Carré’s prose can thin out perilously, but at his best, he’s among the finest writers alive. There’s a reason Philip Roth has called “A Perfect Spy,” le Carré’s 1986 autobiographical work of fiction, “the best English novel since the war.” The Times of London ranked him 22nd on a list of the 50 greatest writers since 1945. His books are less about espionage than they are about human frailty and desire; they’re about how we are, all of us, spies of a sort.

His readership is vast and influential. When le Carré received an honorary degree from Oxford last summer, the Burmese democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi was on hand to receive one as well. In her speech, she declared: “When I was under house arrest, I was also helped by the books of John le Carré. . . . They were a journey into the wider world. Not the wider world just of other countries, but of thoughts and ideas.”

The legendary editor Robert Gottlieb, who worked on many of le Carré’s novels while at Alfred A. Knopf in the 1970s and ’80s, laughed when I proposed that some still consider him a genre hack. “He’s a brilliant writer for whom spies are merely subject matter,” Gottlieb said. “Calling him a spy writer is like calling Joseph Conrad a sea writer, or Jane Austen a domestic-comedy writer.”

Gottlieb added, “Who are these idiots who think otherwise?”

One of the best things about le Carré’s novels is that, from the start, they’ve hummed with the flavorful and recondite language of espionage, a field that has its jargon like any other. In many cases, le Carré has invented that jargon himself. Terms from his novels — “honey trap,” for instance, to denote using sex to compromise a target — have been adopted by the pros. He can probably claim “mole” as well. The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, he says, wrote him once, asking if he invented the idea of employing the word as a synonym for a long-term penetration agent. Le Carré wasn’t certain. But the sole other historical usage turned out to be one he is unlikely to have seen — it appears in a little-known 17th-century volume about King Henry VII by Francis Bacon.

Yet John le Carré’s greatest invention is easily John le Carré himself. Born in 1931 in Poole, a sprawling coastal town in Dorset, he is a product of a childhood both unusual and enviable — if you happen to be a writer. It made him suspicious of charm of any sort and gave him a limitless fascination with humans and their secrets.

Le Carré, as most of his fans know, is a son of a great, debonair English con man. His father, Ronnie Cornwell, born into mundane middle-class life, remade himself into a funny, gracious man who found that he could talk anyone out of anything, and did so. He was friendly with the Kray twins, the notorious and photogenic London gangsters. He was jailed for insurance fraud. He always, le Carré said, had a scam or two in the works.

“In his high days, he had a racehorse at Maisons-Lafitte outside Paris, and dancing girls, and he’d go whizzing off to Monte Carlo with the former lord mayor of London to stay in grand style at the Hotel de Paris,” le Carré said. “His social rise was extraordinary.” When things went badly, le Carré recalls, “not only were the police looking for him, but the boys were. We had to put the cars behind the house, keep the lights out and so on.”

Le Carré likes to cite a passage from the autobiography of Colin Clark, the son of the art collector Lord Clark, who wrote about what it was like to be taken in by le Carré’s father: “He was your favorite uncle, your family doctor, Bob Boothby and Father Christmas rolled into one.” He could, Clark wrote, “fix anything” and did. “Ronnie invited me to Royal Ascot and gave me a few good dinners. Then he showed me a piece of derelict property, which he did not own, promised to double my money in three months and took the lot.”

Le Carré and his brother were often forced to pick up their things and move with no warning. There were repeated bankruptcies. On the rare occasions when his father was around, he demanded total attention. “Anyone caught reading a book,” le Carré said, “was not being loyal.”

When he was 5, his mother fled, and he was packed off to boarding school, remaining in one institution or another until he was 16. (His father paid his tuition, mostly, sending black-market goods like dried fruit when he could not.) Le Carré has few memories of his mother. “If there are times when I have been ruthless in my life, and most of us have been ruthless,” he suggested, it may be in part because of “that chunk of my life that passed me by, which is a mother’s love.”

Before entering Oxford in 1952, he spent several years learning foreign languages and working in Austria with the British Army’s intelligence corps as a German-language interrogator of defectors from the Eastern bloc. At Oxford, he took a first-class honors degree in modern languages and worked covertly for MI5, probing for Soviet agents amid far-left groups.

Shortly after joining MI5 full time, le Carré began writing his first novel, “Call for the Dead,” in longhand in red notebooks. He loved MI5. “It was like working on a great newspaper,” he said. “They were really funny people, not institutionalized, not too corporate in their minds and often very bright with curious interests.”

By 1960, still working on his novel, he had transferred to the foreign intelligence service, MI6, working in Bonn and Hamburg, and perhaps — he does not discuss specifics — tapping phones, running agents, conducting interrogations and performing authorized break-ins. MI6 would not allow him to publish “Call for the Dead” under his own name, David Cornwell. He asked his first publisher, Victor Gollancz, what sort of pseudonym he should choose. “He recommended two Anglo-Saxon monosyllables — something like Chunk Smith or Hank Brown,” le Carré has written. “I chose le Carré. God alone knows why, or where I had it from.”

Le Carré’s house, where he has lived for more than 40 years with his second wife, Jane, sits atop a cliff near Penzance that offers wraparound views of the English Channel. There is wind-raked solitude here, which he prizes.

Le Carré has long been a here-but-not-here presence on the British literary landscape. He doesn’t attend book parties; he doesn’t compete for, nor accept, book prizes. When he was nominated in 2011 for the coveted Man Booker International Prize, given for a writer’s entire body of work, he asked that his name be withdrawn. He dislikes book tours and interviews — he calls them “making bird noises.”

His third novel, “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” may have given him a taste for retreat. It was a sensation when it was published in 1963 — its cool, lapidary brilliance an antidote to the physical mayhem and moral certainty of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Curiosity about its author was such that a British newspaper revealed his identity a year later, and he was forced to leave the service. He found himself struggling with his newfound fame. “I made an awful mess of my first marriage,” he said of his first wife, Ann, with whom he had three sons. “It was hard to live with me being me.” His enormous success also made it hard for him to make friends in his new profession. “I was so abnormal. I mean, most writers struggle. I hadn’t struggled. I couldn’t suddenly go down to the PEN Club and behave like a normal human being, because most of those guys were struggling to make a couple of thousand pounds a year.”

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John le Carré in Hamburg in 1964.Credit
Ralph Crane/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Soon after his divorce, he married Valerie Jane Eustace, an editor with the publisher Hodder & Stoughton. (They have one son, Nicholas, a novelist who writes under the name Nick Harkaway.) Before long they were spending much of their time in Cornwall.

His house and its outbuildings are stately but unpretentious, with a brewing sense of natural drama. It’s a good perch for a former spy, the kind of place where Harrison Ford, portraying a retired and good-souled C.I.A. officer, might contentedly live with his family at the start of a 1990s action film, just before Russian frogmen begin to emerge from the sea. Indeed, le Carré has written that an early draft of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” began with this mental image: “a solitary and embittered man living alone on a Cornish cliff, staring up at a single black car as it wove down the hillside towards him.”

Le Carré remains obsessed with this terrain. He’s more agile than men 20 years his junior mostly because, when his mornings spent writing fiction are complete, he sets out on arduous hikes. His wife only recently made him curtail these adventures. “I now walk the interior, instead of scampering along the cliffs, because she worries about me taking a fall,” he said. “The cellphone reception is almost nonexistent here. If I didn’t die immediately, I’d be stuck for some time.”

When I arrived at the le Carré compound, after a winding 10-mile drive from Penzance along narrow roads lined by hedgerows, he first took me on a brisk tour of the grounds. His pace left me wishing I’d undergone cross-training back in the states.

Later we sat in front of a crackling fire, near a table covered with crisp copies of that morning’s London newspapers and the most recent edition of The New York Review of Books. Le Carré is a funny, generous, opinionated man, an uncanny impressionist (he does an excellent Margaret Thatcher) who only rarely seems slightly out of time. He’s still not entirely comfortable with computers, though he’s handy with Google. He admits he essentially missed the 1960s and knows nothing about rock music, though he had his share, between his two marriages, of ecstatic enthusiasms. “Have you ever done cocaine?” he asked me at one point. When I nodded, he said that he had, once, and that he hoped it didn’t give me, as it did him, a troublesomely long-term erection. He mostly avoids television except for news and rugby, though he does watch the occasional broadcast of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” a program recommended by his adult children. Stewart, he observed, deploys “quite a high level of wit” and possesses a mind that’s “elegant, not abusive.”

It pains him that he has begun to lose his hearing, so that television and film dialogue have become difficult to comprehend. Films, especially, he fears missing out on. He wasn’t sure, at first, that Oldman was right for the part of George Smiley, a character so long identified in the public mind with Alec Guinness, who portrayed the enigmatic spy in two popular and indelible BBC mini-series, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” in 1979 and “Smiley’s People” in 1982. Guinness nailed Smiley’s clammy constitution, which le Carré described in “Call for the Dead” (1961) this way: “Short, fat and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad.”

When le Carré was approached about permitting “Tinker Tailor” to be filmed again, he resisted. “I wasn’t sure the film needed making,” he said, “and thinking about it made me feel disloyal to Alec,” who had been a friend. He quickly came to see Oldman as brilliant casting. “Whereas Alec had no identifiable sexuality at all — the few times he had to lean in to kiss someone on-screen, you really looked away — Oldman has this clear sexuality and authority,” he said. “He played the part like a coil spring, patiently waiting to unwind — to explode really.”

Le Carré likes to hash through actors and their performances. The old spy in him still seeks to size people up, probing for strengths and vulnerabilities. He praises Philip Seymour Hoffman’s “artistic intelligence about his own body.” He recalls opposing Jeremy Irons for the lead role in the 1990 film of his novel “The Russia House” — the part went to Sean Connery — on moral grounds, because of an incident in a London park. “Irons’s vicious dogs,” le Carré said, “attacked my smaller dogs. He never stooped to apologize.” (Irons says that they may have had an altercation but that he does not remember any of the dogs being hurt.)

Before the Berlin Wall fell, le Carré’s interest in the cold war had mostly ended. He had moved on, in novels like “The Little Drummer Girl” (1983), set in the Middle East, and “The Tailor of Panama” (1996), to different subjects and locales.

“After ‘Tinker Tailor’ I thought, I must get off my rump and see the world,” he said, standing to throw another log on the fire. “I tried to put myself at risk a bit and to suffer discomfort and to get frightened, which I did very quickly. I’m no hero.” He saw enough gunfire and other varieties of danger to be in awe of war correspondents and investigative journalists. “In the 17th century,” he said, “they would have been called blood mystics.”

This old spook has kept atop changes in the espionage world. “It’s a different world, multiethnic and amazing,” he said. “Brown faces, black faces, white faces and absolutely classless by appearance.” Le Carré, who taught briefly at Eton, has long been an acid critic of the British class system. He wishes­ to downsize the monarchy, or as he says, put it “on a bicycle.” He’d like to abolish Britain’s elite public schools to make the best teaching resources open to all. (He has written eloquently of his experiences as a student at one such institution, Sherborne: “Boys beat other boys, housemasters beat boys, and even the headmaster turned his hand to beating boys when the crime was held to be sufficiently heinous.”) “I find our obsession with class to be absurd,” he told me now, then observed, smiling, “I have a right to these feelings, because I have pretended to be a gentleman for so long.”

Old spies still drop in on him, like pupils to a master, to chew the fat. “I’ve been told the most extraordinary things on the assumption I was reporting back,” he said. “But since leaving the service, I have never functioned in any intelligence capacity.”

He has, however, emerged as an outspoken critic of American and British foreign policy in the post-9-11 era. When the subject heaved into view, he sighed and clasped his armchair more tightly. Le Carré has the distinction of being among Bush 43’s earliest antagonists. In January 2003, when many of the world’s prominent journalists and writers were falling in line behind the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein, le Carré published a jeremiad in The Times of London with the headline “The United States of America Has Gone Mad.”

“How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein,” he wrote, “is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history.” He took to the streets, along with his family, in protest. A decade after “shock and awe,” he still rubs his forehead while speaking of it, as if discussing a death in the family. On a shelf in his bathroom, le Carré keeps a rubber cartoon figurine of Bush, so he can stare at it while urinating. (He is disappointed in Barack Obama for, among other things, not shutting the prison at Guantánamo.)

When I asked about a more recent object of liberal opprobrium, “Zero Dark Thirty,” Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 film about the capture of Osama bin Laden, le Carré paused for a moment, then smiled at me, then paused again. “Let me,” he said, “try and organize my anger.” Soon after it was released, the film came under fire from commentators in the U.S. and Britain for presenting torture as a necessary evil. The film’s torture scenes infuriated him, and he faults Bigelow for not depicting nearly enough of the multiple types of behind-the-scenes intelligence gathering that were crucial to bin Laden’s capture. “If the film is accurate,” he said, “it is a portrait of such incompetence that it takes your breath away.”

Two of le Carré’s last three novels — “A Most Wanted Man” and his latest, “A Delicate Truth” — have dealt with the global war on terror, probing the kinds of nuances Bigelow avoided. About Islam and the West, he said: “If we spent a fraction of what we spent on war trying to meet people’s misunderstandings about us, we might do a better job.” In “A Delicate Truth,” he directs his attention toward the perils of farming out military duties to mercenaries. “This will sound as if I am speaking large,” le Carré told me, “but Mussolini said that the definition of fascism was when you couldn’t put a cigarette paper between corporate power and government power. I have watched veteran members of our intelligence establishment go seamlessly into these private defense contracting companies.” Maintaining a military, done correctly, he said, is difficult physical, mental and moral work. “It’s so much easier if I come to you and say, ‘Here’s the contract, I want you to liberate Sierra Leone, I don’t give a toss who you take with you and try to keep the killing down.’ ”

It was growing dark outside, and le Carré had had enough for one day. “Would you like a snoot of Champagne?” he asked, popping up from his chair. He has boiled his late life down to four pleasures, which he not long ago summed up this way: “I write and walk and swim and drink.”

Of late, le Carré has begun to put his affairs, some of them messy, in order. He has permitted Adam Sisman, the author of a well-regarded biography of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, wide access to himself and his papers. Sisman told me that both he and le Carré are determined that it be a warts-and-all portrait. “He is so personally charming,” Sisman told me, “that I am working to preserve that splinter of ice in my heart that Graham Greene said every writer needs.”

Whatever splinters of ice remain in le Carré’s own heart seem to be melting. He and his longtime foe, Salman Rushdie, last year patched up their 15-year spat, which broke into the open in 1997 over Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses.” Le Carré opposed the novel’s paperback publication, writing that he was “more concerned about the girl in Penguin Books who might get her hands blown off in the mailroom than I was about Rushdie’s royalties.”

He has also made a pact with his family. “They are under strict orders,” he said, “to speak up if they think I am not writing well any longer, because at this point I could write the telephone directory and get money for it.”

The next morning, he said, he’d be back at his desk, where he works seven days a week. He’d begun another novel, though all he would say about it is that it’s loosely based on one of Joseph Conrad’s stories, one he’d like to translate into espionage terms. He is abiding, he told me, by the message on a large framed poster, given to him by his children, that he has hung on an office wall. It reads: “Keep Calm and le Carré On.”